Miriam Heipertz is a PhD researcher at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and the Amsterdam Center for European Law and Governance (ACELG).

Research 

Miriam’s doctoral project, provisionally titled Owning the Earth: Legal Forms of Resource Access from Empire to the Green Transition, examines how law organises access to – and exclusion from – natural resources. Combining critical legal history with a Law and Political Economy approach, she traces transformations in the legal ordering of resource extraction from imperial concession regimes and postcolonial struggles over permanent sovereignty to the European Union’s contemporary critical-raw-materials framework.

Her current research focuses on the legal architecture of the EU’s green transition, particularly the Critical Raw Materials Act, Strategic Projects, accelerated permitting and the EU’s external raw-materials partnerships. It examines how legal forms such as property, sovereignty, strategic designation, partnership and finance shape who can access resources, for which purposes, and on what terms. More broadly, her work explores how international and European economic law structure relations between resource extraction, capital accumulation, ecological transformation and inequality – and how these arrangements are contested.

Supervised by Professor Dr. Ingo Venzke (Professor of International Law and Social Justice) and Professor Maria Weimer (Professor of European Studies), her doctoral research is part of the joint Sustainable Global Economic Law project conducted by ACIL, ACELG and the Amsterdam Center for Transformative Private Law. She is affiliated with Amsterdam Center for European Studies and SEVEN – University of Amsterdam’s interdisciplinary climate institute. Her research is funded by a grant from Dr. JA Kuijperfonds. 

Educational and Professional Background 

Miriam studied philosophy and law in Bonn (Germany) and Toulouse (France). She obtained her First German State Examination in 2020 and her LL.M. in Public International Law from the University of Amsterdam (cum laude) in 2022. 

Before joining UvA, Miriam worked with a French arts and human rights association and at the Law Faculty of the University of Bonn in Germany as a Moot Court coach and student research assistant at the German, Foreign and International Criminal Law chair. She gained further valuable research experience at the Institut International des Droits de l'Homme in Strasbourg, France, the Permanent Mission of Germany to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland and as a legal consultant at UvA's Business and Human Rights Law Clinic. 

In 2026, Miriam was a Visiting Fellow at UNSW Law & Justice in Sydney, hosted by Dr Ntina Tzouvala.

Amsterdam Center for International Law

Amsterdam Center for European Law and Governance

Sustainable Global Economic Law